Back to school: Operation lunchbox

Want your kids to eat what you pack? Think like a food marketer

Think ahead: making extras or saving leftovers means you’ll always have something to fill a sandwich.

It’s not surprising that Genevieve O’Gleman’s cookbook has popped back up on the bestseller lists of local bookstores during the past couple of weeks.

Les Lunchs de Geneviève, published in French last fall by Éditions La Semaine, is filled with easy, inexpensive ideas for shaking things up in the lunch box along with nutritious recipes for food kids will actually eat. During back-to-school season, she’s right up there with E.L. James and Michael Connelly on Librairie Renaud Bray’s top 50 books.

“After the nonchalance of summer, five days’ worth of school lunches every week is a big stress to parents,” O’Gleman said the other day from her kitchen, where she was getting her daughter Maude ready for the first day of third grade.

The Montreal nutritionist and co-host of a popular family-cooking television show on Télé-Quebec called Cusine futée, parents pressé says she’s hearing a lot from parents of school-age children about their anxiety over the lunch box. There’s nothing more infuriating, she says, than plastic containers that come back at the end of the day barely touched.

The trouble, she suspects, is that too many parents leave the lunch-making to the last minute.

They open the fridge at 10 at night or six in the morning and wonder what on earth to pack into those containers. The result, she says, tends to be dreary and repetitive.

In the school lunchroom, where there are plenty of distractions and not as much supervision as at home, lunch has to look good to get kids eating. The key to making nutritious lunches with what she calls “wow factor” is to be strategic. Approach the lunch box as if you were a food marketer. Use colour and texture to lure them in. Change the shape and format of things to add novelty.

“We eat with our eyes before we start to eat with our mouths. Children especially are attracted to colours and different textures,” she says. “A salad or a sandwich every day gets boring quickly. But if it’s an Asian salad one day and a Mexican taco salad with a different dressing the next day, things are way more interesting.”

O’Gleman says creative lunch boxes are more fun to prepare, but they also serve to foster good eating habits among children by broadening their food repertoire.

“It’s always good to encourage them to try new things along with the familiar, even if it’s one food at a time,” she says.

Here are O’Gleman’s top lunch-box tricks.

Plan ahead: at the grocery store, when making dinner the night before, on the weekend.

In the supermarket, pick up store-bought hummus or tzatziki to pack as tasty and nutritious dips paired with raw vegetables. Stock edamame spreads and herbed goat cheese. Look for whole grain mini pitas, olive ciabatta buns or flatbreads to keep in the freezer for sandwiches.

In the kitchen at supper hour, grill, roast or pan-fry extra chicken breasts or salmon filets and chop them up so they are ready for lunch salads. Making a stir-fry? Slice extra veggies and pack them in individual containers to be paired with dip. When serving pasta, boil extra and refrigerate for pasta salad with canned tuna, already-cooked Nordic shrimp or bocconcini cheese balls and a grating of Parmesan. Leftover rice becomes a lunchtime sushi bowl when stirred with a soy and sesame oil dressing, smoked salmon and sliced cucumbers and carrots.

“Once the chopping board is out, it’s not such a big deal to keep going, but to haul it out again and start preparing crudités after bedtime or in the morning, that’s a pain,” O’Gleman says.

Be creative: Sandwiches are easy and portable, but they don’t have to be predictable. Alter the bread. Try miniature dinner rolls for bite-sized sliders. Stuff pita pockets. Make mini pizza by piling toppings on miniature flatbreads.

Perk up the stuffings by adding shredded carrots, sliced apple or pear, apricot jam, a few leafs of fresh basil, a scattering of raisins or dried cranberries.

Deconstruct: Picky eaters who insist on nothing but ham and cheese sandwiches might go for cubes of ham and cheddar with a stack of multi-grain crackers and a pickle on the side. Turn a fruit salad into a brochette by skewering strawberries, melon balls and grapes.

Add shape and texture: Use an inexpensive hand-held julienne peeler to shred carrots, zucchini and cucumber for sandwiches and salads. Cut sliced bread and hard cheese into shapes with cookie cutters.

Make pasta salads from fusilli and bow-tie pasta.

Make them smile: Scribble daily messages, inside jokes or cartoon characters on inexpensive plastic containers with Sharpie markers, then wash them off at the end of the day. Buy goofy party napkins at the dollar store. Find colourful drinking straws and miniature cocktail-drink umbrellas. Pack lunch in a cardboard Chinese takeout box (available at the art supply store Omer DeSerres).

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